" OpenOffice.org 3.0 costs absolutely nothing but comes closer than anything else to letting you delete your copy of Microsoft Office (which probably cost you a lot). Even though OpenOffice.org—which is, yes, an application suite, not just a Web site—can't do everything Office can, it can do a lot, and it has some of its own tricks that even Office can't manage. Here are a few that may not be obvious, as well as a few ways to make OpenOffice.org less annoying out of the box."

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer sketched a dire portrait of the world economy on Friday, likening it to market conditions in 1837, 1873, and 1929, each of which involved bank failures, high unemployment, and a depression.

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime economic crisis," Ballmer told a retreat of House Democrats in Williamsburg, Va. "There is a lot of history around that, and frankly if you stop and think about it, 1837, '73, '29, 2008, it's almost exactly a whole lifetime between each of the major economic difficulties that we face."

Ballmer said that economic growth in the last 25 years was fueled by innovation, globalization, and debt--and that the current levels of debt were unsustainable. "In 1929, for example, just before the stock market crash, the private debt-to-GDP ratio was 160 percent," he said. "Last year, private sector debt as a percentage of the GDP: 300 percent, far more leverage."

"In my view, what we now have will be a fundamental economic reset," he said. "The economy is going to have to re-establish itself at a level of spending that reflects the real value of underlying assets before we can all start growing again at a healthy rate."

"PC sales (are) discretionary in most home budgets, the second, the third PC," Ballmer said, adding that Microsoft nevertheless will continue to spend more than $9 billion a year in R&D. "Consumer electronics has that characteristic. Fifty percent of capital spending in this country is on information technology. Less capital, less spend on information technology. No sector will be immune."

Microsoft shares have fallen by about half since the fall of 2007, a steeper fall than the Dow Jones index but in line with the tech-centric Nasdaq.

If you look back at Gate's insider trading, he sells microsoft quite often. I'm not saying MSFT won't decline in value, but I wouldnt base it on Gates selling a few million of his 0.8 billion odd shares

While Linux and other Free software has come a long way (Ubuntu/KDE 4.2 goodness! drool...) Until it has corporate backing, it won't replace Windows. It also needs Adobe apps, and all those other apps as well. There may be free alteratives, but there is a learning curve. OSX on the other hand is much better positioned. But between these two, MSFT is up against serious competitors. One is best-of-breed and the other is free. MSFT unfortunately put itself into a OS/App market which were prime targets for commodization. A great idea in the 80s/90s, but not in the 21st century.

MSFT will have to go the way of IBM and Sun in order to survive. Apple is fine where it is, because it puts its software on its hardware, and that is not subject to commodity markets (yet. Eventually cloud/net computing will make that a commodity, but nnot for 5-10 years.)

I'm no geek, but at my office we started using OpenOffice to save money, and we've had a lot of frustrations with it. Also, insider sells are often hard to explain. Maybe Gates just wants to spend (or give away) some of his money.